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Abstract

Collision avoidance is an important topic in multi-robot systems. Existing multi-robot pathfinding approaches ignore sideswipe collisions among robots (i.e., only consider the collision which two agents try to occupy the same node during the same time-step) [1, 3, 4], and allow diagonal move between two adjacent nodes (e.g., Figure 1(b)). However, in many real world applications, sideswipe collisions may also block robots ’ movements or cause deadlocks. For example, as shown in Figure 1, if the size of two robots is as big as the grid size they occupied, collisions will happen not only between robots R1 and R2 in the situation depicted in Figure 1(a), but also that in Figure 1(b), which is typically not considered as a collision in existing multi-robot systems. (a) (b) (c) Figure 2: Illustration of deadloop. The green square and the red square are the robot positions and the goal positions for two robots, respectively. R1 and R2 are robot 1 and robot 2. (a) The initial position for two robots. (b) and (c) The dead looping condition is encountered and repeated in-between (b) and (c) infinitely as each robot makes a move that mirrors the other robot’s.